


Possibilities ever more hideous

by keysburg



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, Winter Soldier - Fandom
Genre: Body Horror, Gen, I Blame Tumblr, Mad Science, bucky's arm is weird, in which i try to channel lovecraft, more like the general idea of body horror and mad science as they might apply to bucky, post winter soldier, without the racism
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-31
Updated: 2015-07-31
Packaged: 2018-04-12 06:42:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 5
Words: 3,721
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4469225
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/keysburg/pseuds/keysburg
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Post Winter Soldier, Bucky’s life is hard enough.  And then his metal arm starts acting up.  The horror AU where Bucky’s arm has a mind of its own</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Program (verb): to provide (a computer or other machine) with coded instructions for the automatic performance of a particular task.

He dragged the blond man out of the river, not knowing that his life was about to change. To get even more disturbing than it was already. Worse than the flash of bone-deep recognition when the blond man gave up fighting him, which was horrible even in a lifetime of nightmares. The programming told him to kill this man, but his instincts said to protect him instead. 

While he failed to complete his mission by killing his target, or even let him die, the other programming held for awhile. It directed him back to the last base. When he got to the bank vault where he was last quartered, it was mostly empty. The chair was still there, but missing pieces. Some had been removed and some had been smashed. The vault had clearly been cleared out in a hurry but he couldn’t tell why. He sat there for hours, as his programming dictated. At first, it was easy to obey the programming. And then his belly developed an aching emptiness and his head a vague pounding. This had never happened before. The program had always sent him back to an active base. He never had to wait for help before, but the program was clear. Stay. He might have sat there for days, but the aches grew to be too much. He left to find food and water. 

He wasn’t sure he would get served at the diner he found, as he was aware he looked like hell. It was conflicting with his training to blend in. There was a line there somewhere: returning to the vault was _programming_ , something imposed from the outside as part of a mission. Blending in, trying to appear inconspicuous: that was _training_. Something he had practiced and honed and that now came from inside of him, dependent on circumstance but not on having a mission. The line between the two was blurry: how often can a program be repeated before the programmed is trained? Before it becomes indelible in your thoughts and actions?

He didn’t have any issues at the diner after all. Apparently the middle-aged waitress had seen worse on the night shift, plus everyone there was distracted by the TV. It gave him a jolt to recognize the helicarriers falling from the sky. It should feel different, having been there and watching it on TV. It didn’t. Either way it seemed a million miles away. He stared at his hands under the table, one metal and one flesh, and tried to figure out what was different between then (fighting someone the tv identified as Steven Rogers and/or Captain America, apparently safe and recovering in a hospital) and now (looking at his hands and everything felt 100% more immediate and alive than it had in a long time). The only answer he could come up with was _programming_. The waitress dropped off his order without meeting his eyes: one lumberjack breakfast, one glass of orange juice, and one entire carafe of water. He managed to get it all down before she came back. His belly now swelled with food, too full, as he left money on the table and hurried out the door.

It was almost morning and he didn’t have to wait long for the library to open. His training moved him there: the need for information was not programmed. Where his training said “Go, and learn, this is important, you need to know this,” his programming said “Stop, you don’t need to know.” It wasn’t easy to sort out the conflicting messages but again survival won out. His training helped him find the information he was looking for on the internet. His need for information brought him to the museum, to read more about the blond man (about Steve) and more about himself. It was there, looking at pictures of himself, that the programming finally broke away. The training was still there (don’t look suspicious) but he no longer felt like he needed to go back to that bank vault. Or that he should find Steve, and kill him. He’d never be free of what he had done, but for now he was free to act as he chose.

Or so he thought.


	2. Training (noun): the action of teaching a person or animal a particular skill or type of behavior.

It started in those days after the end of the program. Distant as he had felt from himself while programmed, he was sure it hadn’t been happening before. It started very small: he kept thinking he saw his metal fingers move out of the corner of his eye, when he hadn’t tried to move them.

The arm was pretty strange at the best of times. It moved in response to his unconscious thoughts just like his actual arm. He could tell where it was in relation to the rest of his body and could feel it when he moved it. Therefore he used it the same: reached with it, ate with it, scratched idle itches with it. He didn’t have proper sensation in it, of course. It never reported pain or fatigue to him, even when it had been damaged. Although it often reported the sensation his brain interpreted as _pressure_. The sensors for that seemed mostly clustered on the palm and fingers, just like his real arm. They let him know when he was holding something and how tightly. He could grip things without breaking them or dropping them, but he couldn’t feel damage to the metal fingers, or heat, or cold. There were some pressure sensors on the arm itself, but they seemed further apart. He felt it when he rolled wrong in bed and trapped the arm under his body, but he couldn’t always feel the brush of his long sleeves over the surface of the arm. 

Mostly, it was like having an arm that was asleep, just before the pins and needles started. He could move it but not feel it, except in the most general way. Even around the area where it was attached he didn’t feel much. Occasionally a slight irritation or stretch of the skin, but most of that area was scarred and a callus had built up under the edge of the metal. Both scar and callus reduced the sensation and what he felt mostly was temperature. The damn thing was always cold, somehow. And heavy. It was attached internally as well as externally. He could tell because he heard it clicking in his shoulder joint, and it pulled heavily inside somewhere when he let it dangle. He found himself almost always supporting it or engaging it so it didn’t pull on the joint. 

Still, he definitely felt it when he moved it on purpose but when it seemed to move at the edge of his vision, he didn’t feel anything. It didn’t help that he always thought he saw the fingers moving when he was already keyed up. His training let him evade the dogged attention of Steve and his friend, the man who had wings that let him fly. It seemed one of them was always right behind him, tracking him. And so he stayed on the move, using his training to move quickly and without drawing attention to himself. He didn’t have anywhere to go anyway, his old address in Brooklyn unrecognizable. Nowhere felt right either. Everywhere he went seemed uncomfortable and strange, even places he seemed to recognize. It might be just training keeping him on his toes because he was being followed. It might be the last lingering impact of a program, nudging him back to base. But it was less likely anyone would notice him, notice the arm, if he was only just passing through anywhere he went. His training kept him alert, which helped him keep a low profile.

Unfortunately, his training sometimes made him _hyper_ alert. When that happened, it felt like there were eyes everywhere. Loud noises made him flinch. He spent hours moving covertly, in circles, via different types of transport, trying not to overreact to the stimuli that came with losing yourself in a crowd. That’s when it happened at first, the times when he was walking the knife edge between alertness and outright paranoia. He kept thinking he saw them move, but he didn’t feel it. When he looked down at his hand, it was still. So he ignored it, writing it off as another side effect of being hyper-alert. 

Being followed already pushed him too close to paranoia. Surely if his fingers were moving, he’d feel it. Even if they weren’t really his.


	3. Maintain (verb): 1. cause or enable (a condition or state of affairs) to continue. 2. provide with necessities for life or existence.

The glimpses didn’t stop. They were still infrequent, but were now happening outside his hyper-aware periods. Sometimes when he first woke up. Before his eyes focused he would see, but not feel, a twitch. Again, no movement after he forced his eyes into focus. During meals he kept the metal hand under the table. Sometimes light reflected into his eyes as if his metal fingers were moving. No movement when he looked down, but no glare coming off the metal either.

It was probably just a little electrical glitch, if anything. A week after his first morning glimpse of movement, Steve somehow stumbled over the abandoned tenement where he had been squatting for two days. He managed to sneak away, but it triggered another hyper-aware period (more like full blown paranoid fleeing, this time) that lasted almost 48 hours. When he wound down he found an old motel that seemed anonymous enough, three states from the near-miss. He followed his own self-soothing programming then: he ate, he drank water, then one beer, and he opened up the arm.

Maintaining the arm was a combination of cleaning a firearm and repairing a damaged computer. The firearm bit came more easily to him. He learned that long before the arm came along. He had to do the computer part first, after taking off several of the outer plates. The most delicate bits were encased in yet more plating, so he dusted everything thoroughly with compressed air first and removed the secondary plates after. Once opened, he could use the compressed air inside the secondary compartments, and then check the conditions of the components, examine the connections, test the electrical signals. He hadn’t the slightest idea how this part worked, or what he’d do if he ran out of spare components from the kit he had been issued. He was trained to check for obvious problems, replace bits that were color-coded. He hadn’t even ever repaired this bit himself before (or he didn’t think so), and was only drilled on it after a mission was almost compromised by its breakdown. The details came and went-- something about a crack in the plating and a dust storm and the arm seizing up. It had been awful, hauling around the broken thing afterward, a sensation even multiple memory wipes hadn’t erased. It was strange enough to have been given this thing, but at least when it worked he could pretend it was part of him. Soft clicks, cold temperature, odd weight and all, he could forget. When it was broken, it was just an albatross. Well, the computer components all looked and tested okay, at any rate. 

Caring for the arm also made it feel more like his. His weapon, if not his body. This part, like maintaining a firearm, also went faster. He didn’t know why the memory wipes didn’t really impact the training. Maybe it was a different part of the brain. They gave him a refresher course on things before each mission, but something about repetition and muscle memory meant some things just stuck. He cleaned the metal components, gave them a light careful oiling, not enough to seep into the computer casings. Bolted the metal plates back on, put away his tools, and wiped the table. That provided no answers. Maybe he was just seeing things.

Table cleaned, he reached for his journal, re-reading the last few pages. It was hard piecing together his fractured memory, even with the internet and a flood of information about Steve, SHIELD and Hydra to prompt associations. He wrote recollections in the journal upon waking, and then tried to sort through dream vs. memory in the evening. His last dreams had been a repeat of what had come before: snow, cold, the sound of a distant train, the feeling of being restrained. He wasn’t finding any answers to anything today. 

He woke slumped over the table in the shabby motel room, his arms over his head and the journal between them. He had pushed himself too hard fleeing from Steve, and soothed himself right into passing out, waking with a crick in his neck. Not good. Not safe. He had been trained to take better care of himself than that. He reached for the journal with his normal hand, to write fractured bits of dreams before they slipped away. And then he froze. 

The book lay open to pages that were mostly blank, although he was sure he had been staring at the word _cold_ written over and over when he passed out. Instead, written in a cramped manner were three sideways lines.

STOP.

KILL TARGET.

BASE.

That was not ink on his metal fingers. It was just oil, he must not have been careful cleaning up. (He was always careful cleaning up.) He must have just been writing in his sleep. With his flesh hand. He had been far, far too tired. After his last hyper aware period (which lasted more than 24 hours) he had woken when sleeping walking in a park, for heaven’s sake. 

After all, it wasn’t like his arm had programming of its own.


	4. Compulsion (noun): 1. the action or state of forcing or being forced to do something; constraint. 2. an irresistible urge to behave in a certain way, especially against one's conscious wishes.

Well, it had to have _some_ programming of its own, or there was no point in all those computer bits. He had assumed that the program was limited to instructing how the hardware of the arm should work and translated signals from his nerves to that hardware to make it happen. And from its limited sensors back to his nerves. What began to worry him then was that the arm might have a mission of its own in that program. A mission that was more than ‘to do as he told it’. 

It seemed unlikely. He had never gone off-mission before failing to kill Steve, so such a fail-safe was unnecessary. Computers knew things though. What if the computers in his arm knew he had failed at his mission? That his programming collapsed? That Hydra was gone, and he was free in the world? Any of it might be possible, and he had no way to tell. 

He was sure it was moving when he wasn’t looking now, but it didn’t repeat writing a message--if it _had_ written him a message. He left a pen near his metal hand constantly, when awake and when sleeping. No more messages appeared, and weeks passed. The twitching probably was just an electrical glitch. He changed out every spare part he had for his arm, hoping that would help. It didn’t, and neither did the limited rewiring he was comfortable with doing. He wasn’t sure what he would do if it was a glitch, and the arm stopped working again. He probably couldn’t get it off alone, and the idea of hauling it around broken was terrible. He was less sure what he’d do if it wasn’t a glitch. Life was a lot easier with it than without it. 

He was in a subway station when it happened. Just passing through another city, after another task of menial labor. It was easier to get short-term, undocumented work quickly in a city, and money was a constant concern. The subways station was crowded, and he was surveying the people around him. The last wisps of programming told him the best way to kill his target without being seen, if he found them. But he didn’t have a target, not anymore. His training instead saw each person as a resource to exploit. That old man’s pants were two sizes too big, it would be easy to pick that pocket. The girl by the pillar had done a double-take on his face and smiled. She might be willing to provide him some company and a place to sleep for the night, if he could risk anyone seeing the arm. There was an open-faced young man on the opposite platform who stood up to give his seat to someone with crutches. With the right story he could probably manipulate him into any number of things. He sighed. This was better than hyper-alertness, but he also wondered if he’d ever stop seeing the people around him only for what they could give him. For now that training was valuable, but he hoped it wouldn’t always be necessary. 

The platform grew more crowded as time passed, and someone jostled him. He turned, and he thought he saw Steve’s face. The man invading his space had the blond haircut and strong jawline that was too familiar, but he wasn’t Steve. He tried to calm down, to take deep breaths and avoid another exhausting hyper-awareness spell - he had more work for tomorrow, if he could keep it together. His mind settled, but something remained off. Then he watched in horror as his metal arm, moving without his intention, unsheathed a knife hidden below his jacket and drove it toward the man’s guts. 

He only saw it, didn’t feel it move, but managed to seize the metal wrist with his flesh hand and twist just right to force the metal limb to drop the knife. The blond man had seen only his aborted movement and looked at him suspiciously. Horrified, he turned and moved as quickly as he could in the throng, away from the man who was not Steve. He dodged left and right moving straight up the stairs and onto the street. He was five blocks away before he stopped shaking.


	5. Incompatible (adjective): 1. unable to live together harmoniously. 2. not consistent or able to coexist with

Enough was enough. He couldn’t go around almost stabbing any blond man with an impressive jaw he might come across. He put in his second day of work as scheduled, and then went to spend the money immediately.

He had to make three stops and pick two pockets before he had everything he could think to get. Picking pockets wasn’t ideal but he didn’t have enough money for everything he needed, just a couple things and a little food. He went back to the boarding house where he had paid a week in advance and locked himself in the little room to sit at a small desk. 

Paper and pen went on his left side. He took out a stolen iPhone and wiped its contents. He set a timer for ten minutes, and then started the video. He sat his arms on the desk, closed his eyes, and thought of pleasant things. The girl from the subway station. Crispy home fries. The crack of a bat. Sun dappled water. When the alarm went off, he replayed the video. The arm hadn’t moved.

He repeated this experiment, but after approximately 60 seconds of nice things, he thought about Steve: the fight on the helicarrier, dragging him from the river, the near miss at the squat. He had to replay these in his memory a few times until the alarm went off. 

When he replayed the video, the hand began to move right at the one minute mark. First the fingers twitched, and then the hand started opening and closing. It didn’t reach for the pen and paper, but it moved a lot. And he hadn’t felt it.

On the third trial, he thought alternately about Steve and then about good deeds Steve had done, according to the internet. He didn’t want to kill Steve. This time, the hand wrote a message:

KILL TARGET

RETURN TO BASE

He sighed, pulled out a new sheet of paper, and repeated the trial. This time he added what few good memories he had recovered of Steve to the thoughts about his good deeds and how he didn’t want to kill him. Giggling under a blanket as kids. At a movie theater as teens. Drinking in uniform. 

In the video, the hand scrawled the same message. He took out fresh paper, and tried again. Tried a fifth and sixth time, consciously holding his arm as still as possible, then attempting to clench it into a fist. It didn’t work; he got the same message every time. Maybe the arm couldn’t gather his intentions just from his thoughts. 

He had no idea how to reprogram it, so he tried a different method of communication. This time, when he closed his eyes and thought of Steve, he tapped on his arm in Morse Code, still thinking of Steve. Mission terminated. Disengage target. For ten minutes, he pictured Steve and tapped the message into different areas of his metal arm, just in case. When the alarm went off, the paper read:

MESSAGE RECEIVED

KILL TARGET

RETURN TO BASE.

Shit. Apparently it wouldn’t respond to his direct commands. He really didn’t want to, but he could probably track down a stray Hydra scientist or two. Intimidate them into reprogramming it. Tracking them down would be the easy part, his training made him capable. He wasn’t sure how he’d ensure they did what he asked and didn’t reprogram the arm with something--worse. But with over an hour of video for proof, he really had no other options. Meanwhile, he would have to take precautions. 

He ate his dinner, barely tasting it. Got ready for bed, using the common bathroom on this floor of the boarding house, fortunately empty this early. Back in his room, he went for the surprisingly expensive item he had purchased. 

It had been hard to find real handcuffs for sale, and not cheap, easily breakable ones meant for sex. As he attached one circlet to the bedframe, he had an uneasy flash of memory. Rows of bedframes, a young girl sleeping handcuffed to each one. He shook his head. Whatever that was, it could wait to be prodded out of his memory. He went to put the second circlet around his metal wrist, and found his hand had moved while he had been distracted.

It was wrapped around his throat. As he pulled at it uselessly with his flesh hand, it began to squeeze.

**Author's Note:**

> Title is a mangled quote from Herbert West, Reanimator by H.P. Lovecraft


End file.
